INFO: Comparing the Dell Venue 8 Pro & the Asus VivoTab Note 8

I own a Dell Venue 8 Pro. Love the thing. It sits next to my remote controls in my living room & comes with me on mostly non-business trips. But something recently got me thinking: I’ve played with the Asus VivoTab Note 8 (in anticipation of getting one later this week, mostly because of it’s Wacom Digitizer i.e. precision, pressure sensitive stylus) and noticed that the performance definitely “felt” faster than my Dell Venue 8 Pro… but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was.

PERFORMANCE BENCHMARKA coworker of mine, Jeff Luna, ran NovaBench on both models and came up with, what ended up being unsurprising results.

If you can’t read the photo:

Component

Dell Venue 8 Pro

Asus VivoTab Note 8

RAM Speed

3566MB/s

3922 MB/s

Floating Point Ops/sec

56.9M

77.4M

Integer Ops/sec

100.8M

132.5M

Drive Write Speed

32MB/s

45MB/s

BATTERY LIFE ANECDOTALLYNow in addition to this, we both agree that, despite the specs saying otherwise, the Asus seems to also have a longer lived battery. The Dell Venue 8 Pro states it gets 8 hours of battery while the Asus VivoTab Note 8 says it gets 6 hours – which I attributed to having the Wacom Digitizer.

Well, the exact opposite seems to be the case. We both agreed that the Asus seems to have closer to 8 hours of battery life while the Dell, even with it’s most recent firmware updates, seems to have less than this – however we can’t seem to agree what the life is for it because of differing levels of usage.

SIZE & COST MATTER It should be noted that the Dell costs substantially less than the Asus VivoTab Note 8 – roughly 33% less/$100 less. Generally, a 32GB Dell Venue 8 Pro can be found for $200 whereas the 32GB Asus VivoTab Note 8 can be found for $300, with 64GB models being roughly offset by the same. The Dell is also thinner & lighter than the Asus & both of these things make sense when you consider the Asus adds the Wacom Digitizer which not only adds to the cost of parts but can add to the bulk of the device.